Star back with D1 offers led Dublin to a football title. Can he do the same in basketball?

A little over a month ago, the city of Dublin witnessed its team take home a state title in football.

Now the Fighting Irish are again looking to capture a state title — this time on the hardwood — as the basketball team is poised to make a run.

The team got off to a 6-0 start despite missing half the team because of the state football playoffs and is now 20-2.

“We were actually missing seven guys from the football team,” Dublin head basketball coach Ben Smith said in an interview with The Telegraph. “It just adds more to what was already going because those guys have a championship mentality from football.”

The biggest addition has been 6-2 , 225-pound forward JaQues Evans, who is averaging a team-high 13.7 points per game.

Evans was also a major part of the football team, rushing for 40 touchdowns and more than 2,500 yards, while serving as the team’s punter, kicker and one of its top linebackers.

“He is just a special kid. He is one of those kids that only comes through ever so often at Dublin,” Smith said. “One thing we always say, myself and coach (Roger) Holmes off the football team, he just plays. You don’t have to worry about him showing up. The tougher the moment gets, the more competitive it gets, the better he plays.”

From football to basketball

Evans is a bruiser on the football field with a heavy workload so the transition from football season straight into basketball season can be tough.

There isn’t much time for a body to recuperate after a title as he had just eight days between the state title victory and his first appearance on the basketball court.

Yet in that first game, he finished with 13 points before scoring 21 two days later in a one-point win over Wilkinson County.

“It don’t come easy so you have to work hard,” Evans said. “I just tell them I will give them what I’ve got and they give me what they got. Everybody comes to play as one and you never know what the outcome is.”

While he loves being able to play the game of basketball for his school, his passion is football.

He’s juggling the recruiting process in football and has offers from top schools like Tennessee, Miami and Arizona State.

He said he plays basketball to keep in shape for the football season. But he doesn’t take the game of basketball lightly, as he expects to excel at it.

“I don’t play it just to play it. I have to put something into it,” Evans said. “I have good talent for both sports.”

Can the Fighting Irish win another title?

Smith is in his first season as the head coach of the Fighting Irish but he grew up in Dublin and was a player on the 2006 basketball championship team.

That calendar year was also the last time the football team won a state title before 2019. Yet, those didn’t occur in the same school year.

This season has been a chance for Smith to go full circle, now watching from the sidelines. Smith said that he can’t even imagine what it would mean for the city to get another state title.

“I couldn’t even imagine going back-to-back in the same year months apart. It would be the biggest thing that has had happened in some amount of time,” Smith said. “We have got a long way to go before we get to that. We don’t even think that far ahead. But you know in a vacuum if that was to happen … it would shut down the city for sure.”